Site Mobile Navigation

Shaped by a Sculptor’s Hand, and Foot

Plain Luxury Markos Drakotoss minimalist taste is reflected in the the sparsely decorated kitchen with its library-like installation of books covered in a milky white glazing.Credit
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

WHEN a four-by-five-foot pine storage bin appeared in front of Markos Lambros Drakotos’s five-story town house on East 81st Street last August, his neighbors were not pleased. “It was this huge brown box and it was a garbage bin,” said Christina Desbiez, who lives a few houses away. “People were afraid it would attract rats, and it wasn’t very attractive, either.”

But it was what came next that caused real problems. Even his most open-minded neighbors, and those inured to the sights and sounds of construction projects that pervade this neighborhood, were unprepared for the spectacle in early February of a sculptor named Miggy Buck supervising the installation of a 300-pound concrete right foot she created atop the storage-bin-turned-pedestal. (Mr. Drakotos paid some construction workers across the street to help unload it from Ms. Buck’s pickup truck.)

“He asked me, ‘Do you love it?’ ” recalled Mrs. Desbiez, who has lived on the block for three years and said she knows Mr. Drakotos socially. “I said, if you want to get your neighbors mad and have people start talking, then that’s the way to do it.”

That was not his intention at all, said Mr. Drakotos, whose guileless mien, modified Caesar haircut and very round face suggest a grown-up Charlie Brown. “I didn’t mean to offend anybody,” he said, and seemed to mean it.

Not that Mr. Drakotos, 37, is new to real estate controversy. A lawyer and the president of a company called Sponge that makes organic skin care products, he is also the vice-president of his family business, M & N Management, which owns and manages some 30 buildings in New York City. In 2001, he caused a stir in Hell’s Kitchen when he opened a bar in the basement of one of his properties. Neighbors objected both to the concept — an exclusive speakeasy that traded on the building’s former status as an S.R.O. — and its unapologetic name: Single Room Occupancy. In 2006, he began work on a new bar on West 56th Street that he’s calling Section 8, in another apparent homage to low-income housing.

Still, he said, he was taken aback by the reaction of his fellow Upper East Siders to the foot. “They didn’t think it fit in,” he said. “We’re in an area filled with museums, some of the best in the world, but it’s too much on the inside,” he continued. “The foot brings a whole new dimension to the neighborhood.”

Mr. Drakotos, whose father transformed a one-truck moving company into a real estate empire, has been collecting contemporary art since 2001. He bought his 6,000-square-foot house last year for $6.95 million, hoping, he said, to make a home that would be suitable for a future married life, should a likely prospect appear, and to bring a little West Chelsea to the Upper East Side. And he wanted to do it without the help of a designer or architect.

“When you work with a designer, at the end of the day, it’s their vision,” he said. Instead, he hired Ms. Buck, whose work he had seen in a restaurant, both to collaborate with him and to execute his own plans for the nearly $750,000 gut renovation of his duplex and the three apartments above. Working with an artist allows him to stay in control of the project and to “personalize what I’m doing,” he said.

“He has a vision of what he wants to do, and then I’ll go and figure out how to make it all work,” said Ms. Buck, speaking at her studio, where the diamond pendant glittering at her neck seemed at odds with her calloused hands and adroitness with a blowtorch. Since she designs and fabricates pieces herself, she added, “I’m probably cheaper than going to a designer.”

They started on the outside, painting over the black sash trim to make the entire facade a sparkling white, in a deliberate evocation of Claridge’s Hotel in London. This didn’t please the neighbors, either; the white stood out among the handsome brick and limestone shades that surround it. “People said, you know, we’re not in Greece, Markos,” said Mrs. Desbiez. But Mr. Drakotos remained steadfast. “It had this beautiful glow,” he said. “The white made it look a lot more contemporary, and everything grew out of that.”

By everything, he meant his eventual approach to the house as a whole, which juxtaposed the careful preservation of original details with contemporary design elements, furnishings and art. Apart from the paint, for example, the facade remains unaltered, but around the front setback, where other town houses on the block generally have short, cast-iron fences, Mr. Drakotos installed ten 36-by-42-inch stainless steel panels, a stainless steel door, and, of course, the foot. Inside, he preserved the crown molding, the marble fireplaces and the sometimes-cracked tile around them, and refinished the parquet floors. “It wasn’t easy to hold onto that stuff,” Mr. Drakotos said. “Part of the ceiling was falling down and you were trying to save the molding.” But “there has to be a certain continuity that flows through the property,” he continued.

The restored space provided a blank canvas for the work that followed. Ms. Buck and Mr. Drakotos designed metal screens and a cover for an exposed column based on a series of her wall sculptures — hundreds of metal washers, soldered together — that visually separate the kitchen and living room but allow light from the living room’s south-facing glass wall to filter through. “It looks like a waterfall,” Mr. Drakotos said of the shadows that constantly play across the kitchen and living room floor and wall. “It’s very calming.”

In the master bedroom, there is little more than a restored fireplace, a queen-size bed with a Poltrona Frau headboard, a cascade of pewter silk drapes and paintings by Yayoi Kusama and Alighiero Boetti. “I don’t want to clutter the house up,” he said. “I want to leave it with a lot of breathing space and I want the focus to be on the artwork.” In his second bedroom, Mr. Drakotos will display an installation by the sculptor Dustin Yellin: 6-foot-tall blocks of etched resin. Works by Vik Muniz, Helmut Newton and Ernesto Caivano also line his walls.

A 47-by-59-inch photograph by Massimo Vitali dominates the living room, showing a landscape of bleached-out beach dotted with colorful specks that echoes the palette Mr. Drakotos used throughout the house: lots of white, some black, and, here and there, a moment of color. Among the pale walls and polished oak floors, a simple white leather Poltrona Frau couch and two basketball-orange Poltrona Frau chairs face the fireplace.

Mr. Drakotos and Ms. Buck designed a staircase of wide, flared zebrawood planks, lined with stainless steel, that leads from the living room to the second floor. His unusual choices of materials extend to the bathrooms, with coconut wood for the ceilings; azul macauba, a Brazilian granite with veins of cobalt and tan, on the floors; and unfinished white tumbled marble for the walls. “I like it because it looks like a painting,” he said.

The collaboration will continue, Mr. Drakotos said, as soon as Ms. Buck’s son, Miles, born on Feb. 11, is a bit older, and the liquor license for Section 8 is approved. But the major refurbishments are complete, at least until Mr. Drakotos’s bachelor days are, too. He was careful to renovate with an eye toward converting to a single-family residence. “I just have to unseal the hallway doors,” he said, “and maybe take out the kitchens.”

Until then, despite ongoing objections from the neighbors, Mr. Drakotos’s alterations will remain in place, including the foot. But that piece, on loan from Ms. Buck, is for sale, and Mr. Drakotos will eventually have to replace it with something else.

“I’m sure that he’ll bring controversy every couple of months,” said Mrs. Desbiez, whose 2-year-old daughter, Juliette, is quite fond of the sculpture. “But at least a little laughter, too.”